Daring a Duke

by Claudia Dain

  “Within reason, certainly,” Jane answered. “Is that not true here? You may not marry where you will?”

  “As long as everyone agrees,” Amelia said, “and by everyone I mean fathers, naturally.”

  “And fathers can be difficult,” Eleanor said.

  “Some make quite a study of it,” Louisa said. “Melverley is an absolute genius at being difficult. One can’t but wonder if he was born that way or acquired his genius through years of effort.”

  “Effort, I should say,” Eleanor said with a half smile.

  Jane had not yet met Lord Melverley, Louisa and Eleanor’s father, but every indication was that he fulfilled every notion Jane had of the typical behavior of an English lord, her uncle excluded, she tentatively assumed, based solely upon her study of him last night at dinner. Though as Uncle Hyde had married a Boston woman, it seemed likely that Molly had exerted a most welcome influence upon him.

  Who knows what sort of man he might have been without her? Entirely like the monstrous Melverley, almost certainly.

  “Would your father be difficult, Jane, if you decide to fall in love with someone here?” Eleanor asked.

  The question caught her completely wrong-footed. Fall in love with an Englishman? The idea was laughable.

  “Eleanor, you are too bookish by half,” Louisa said, twirling one of her red curls around her finger. “One doesn’t decide to fall in love. One simply falls.”

  “And gets caught by some likely man,” Amelia said, smiling.

  “If it’s as haphazard as all that, then one is left to hope that the man is likely,” Eleanor said, “which requires far more trust in chance than I am comfortable with.”

  “If one requires comfort, one should not fall in love,”

  Amelia said.

  “As I also require comfort, I do think that love may elude me,” Jane said, believing that closed the subject nicely.

  Eleanor was not at all astute at determining closed doors.

  “But Jane, you can’t mean that you’ll marry without love, not when it is so simple to marry for love in your country,”

  Eleanor said, her dark blue eyes bright with alarm.

  “Eleanor, no, I only mean that I may not marry at all. It is possible.”

  “But not likely,” Louisa said.

  “Why not?” Jane asked.

  “Surely your father would never allow that,” Amelia said.

  “He certainly wouldn’t force me to marry,” Jane said.

  What a perfectly odd conversation.

  “Yet would he force you not to marry?” Louisa asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Jane said. The conversation had gone completely beyond her. She had never spent so much time discussing marriage in her life, to so little purpose.

  This is what happened to women who were restricted to back gardens.

  “You may marry where you will, love where you will?”

  Louisa asked. At Jane’s nod, Louisa said, “Then you are in the perfect situation to find love and a husband, Jane, here and now, at the height of the London Season. We shall see you married before you know it.”

  “I don’t want to be married before I know it,” Jane said, resisting the urge to rise to her feet and pace the room, which she was certain would be seen as impossibly rude and fulfilling every expectation these British relatives of hers had of rough American manners. What the English thought of Americans was obvious and without question. Rusticated bumpkins, every one of them. Rough and unruly, untu-tored and unfashionable, ungrateful and fractious. Fractious, perhaps she might concede, but only when properly provoked. England had most properly provoked them and likely always would.

  “But Jane,” Eleanor said, reaching over to take her hand.

  Far from being comforted, Jane found the action appalling.

  Was she in need of comfort? She was not. “Did you not come to London to find a suitable husband?”

  “No, I did not,” Jane said. “Whyever would you think that?”

  “Because that’s why every unmarried woman comes to London for the Season,” Amelia said. “To catch a husband.”

  Jane felt herself blanch. Had her mother known of this?

  She could not. She absolutely could not. It was one thing to form a possible bond of warm feeling with her English relations, but it was not to be anticipated that she could ever be tempted to go so far as to marry one of them. Her mother could not be such a hopeless romantic as all that.

  “I can assure you that I had no such notion. I came to have an adventure, and to become better acquainted with my cousins . . . and their wives,” Jane said stiffly.

  “An adventure?” Eleanor asked, her eyes gleaming as the words left her lips. “What a wonderful idea.”

  “If you’re looking for an adventure, the London Season is the place to find one,” Amelia said, studying Jane. As Amelia was not in the habit of studying her, Jane found it disconcerting. “You may even find that you fall in love.”

  “I think that highly unlikely,” Jane said. It was flatly impossible, but she saw no need to be pointlessly rude.

  There were a few moments of strained silence, which Eleanor spent looking at her curiously. Louisa and Amelia looked less curious than mildly amused. What there was to be amused about Jane couldn’t possibly guess.

  “Have you ever met an English gentleman, Jane?” Louisa asked.

  “A few,” Jane answered. “My cousin, Cranleigh, most obviously.”

  “And what do you think of Cranleigh?” Louisa asked, not at all kindly it seemed to Jane.

  Jane cast a look at Amelia, who was smiling and staring at Louisa. Amelia then looked at Jane and winked.

  “Yes, Jane, do tell us what you think of Cranleigh,” Amelia said. “I do wonder if you think him as big a brute as I have always found him to be. Or is he better behaved in New York than in London? I do suppose that’s possible, though I must confess to thinking it unlikely.”

  “And I must confess,” Jane said with a grin, “that, being ignorant of London standards on this sort of thing, I cannot make any sort of comparison. In New York, Cranleigh, as a guest in my parent’s home, was hardly brutish enough to have made any impression of brutishness upon either my family or our acquaintances. Or at least they made no comment upon it.”

  “No comment, but that is an entirely different matter, Jane,” Amelia said, cutting off Louisa, which was most pleasant of her. “That may only prove that you Americans are more forbearing than we are here.”

  “Oh, I hardly think that,” Jane said. “As our revolution must attest, we are not forbearing when other avenues are open to us.”

  “The avenue of taking up arms against your lawful king?” Louisa said.

  Jane snapped her gaze to Louisa and said, “I believe it was his lawfulness which was in question, Louisa. And I further believe that the question was firmly answered.”

  A stilted silence, which was surely not unexpected, settled over the room. Eleanor, as was also not unexpected, broke it.

  “I should like to visit New York,” Eleanor said. “What must it be like if Cranleigh fit in so well there?”

  Amelia laughed. Even Louisa chuckled. Jane smiled and nodded at Eleanor. It was such that the moment passed and they settled, slowly, into the outward semblance of female sociability.

  “What sort of adventure did you think to have, Jane, if not love?” Louisa asked.

  “The adventure of travel,” Jane said, “for one.”

  “And for another?” Louisa prompted.

  Jane was not going to reveal her mother’s hopes for her, no, nor her brothers’ buried animosity toward the British government. This was neither the place nor the company for confessions of that sort.

  “An adventure of any sort, but of what particular sort, I have no idea. As I am to leave promptly after the wedding upon the first tide, I can’t think any further adventure is open to me,” she said.

  “Are you
open to suggestions?” Louisa asked.

  It sounded amiable enough, but as Louisa was not an amiable sort, Jane was properly suspicious.

  “Do you have one?” Jane countered. “Something lawful?” she added as Louisa was opening her mouth. Eleanor barked out a laugh.

  “You could arrange it, you know,” Louisa said, staring at Jane with a very nearly challenging look. “If you truly want to stay, to have your adventure, I know the perfect person to make it happen.”

  “Sophia Dalby,” Eleanor said, leaning forward, her eyes alight with excitement and mischief. Jane was certain it was mischief. Whyever should Eleanor, who had seemed a most pleasant girl until this instant, want her to fall into mischief? “Tell her you want to stay and she’ll arrange it handily, Jane. Of course, when one deals with Lady Dalby, one must expect a few surprises.”

  “Quite a few, I should say,” Louisa said crisply.

  “And yet quite pleasant, when taken as a whole,” Amelia said, smiling at Jane.

  “Very true,” Louisa said. “It is when one breaks it down into bits that one feels the swell of panic. Best to just ignore the particulars and enjoy the results, Jane. One must show no fear when one treats with Sophia Dalby. I do wonder if you’re up to it. She can be quite formidable.”

  “Don’t lie to her, Louisa,” Eleanor chided. “She’s always formidable, Jane, but she does get the job done.”

  “There is no job of mine that requires doing,” Jane said, sounding a bit prim, truth be told, and which she was certain cast her in an unfavorable light. The British were always going on about how rudely mannered the Americans were; she was determined to be judged better.

  “Oh, well, if you’re going to be missish about it, then you should avoid Lady Dalby completely. She’d eat you whole,”

  Louisa said, picking up her cup to take a sip of her tea.

  “I’m hardly afraid of her,” Jane said, sitting up very straight, her neck tense. This town house brawl was just the sort of adventure she had imagined happening whilst in an English salon in London. Women never quite said what they meant. It was quite exhausting trying to keep pace with their pointless manipulations. “I simply have no need of her.”

  “No need for an adventure?” Eleanor said, looking quite forlorn, clearly on Jane’s behalf. “When she could, and would, I am certain, so easily arrange for you to have one?

  You can’t go back to New York so soon, Jane. We’ve just met you. Don’t you want to stay?”

  Stay? Not particularly. But she did want an adventure, even an English one. If Sophia Dalby, whom she knew by reputation if not experience, could arrange for her to stay and thereby have an adventure, and if she could tweak Louisa’s nose in the bargain, well then. What was there to consider?

  “I should very much enjoy talking to Lady Dalby,” Jane said, staring at Louisa, smiling at her in a very firm manner. “How soon can you arrange it, Louisa? Or can’t you?”

  “Tomorrow at the wedding, I should think, Jane,” Louisa said, smiling very much like a cat over a twitching mouse.

  Mouse? Jane was no mouse. But if Louisa didn’t yet realize that, so much the better.

  Two

  The marriage of the Marquis of Iveston to Miss Penelope Prestwick was a quiet, joyous affair. The couple was quite clearly in love, their families delighted by the match, and the wedding breakfast, reflecting that delight, was very nearly the biggest social event of the Season.

  Or so Jane had been told. She was inclined to believe it.

  Hyde House was filled nearly to bursting, or should have been had it been a normal-sized house. As it was, Hyde House, the blue reception room in particular, was comfortably full of guests who gave every impression of enjoying themselves as two more of their number found themselves successfully wed.

  Jedidiah and Joel, her two older brothers, were stuck to her side like burrs, looking quite solemn in their black coats and breeches. Jed was wearing a light blue China silk waistcoat, which did relieve the somberness of his aspect somewhat. Joel was wearing a silver gray waistcoat, which should have looked stark, but which looked rather elegant instead. As Joel was not normally given to looking elegant, she found she was quite entertained by it now. Joel and Jed did not look entertained, at least not overmuch. They looked about the expansive room with expressions of stoic observation. There were very many Englishmen about, which was always slightly off-putting, but having a sister amongst the suspect throng was something they would enjoy even less.

  It was perfectly plain why having an adventure was so very difficult. And it was equally plain that she was going to follow Louisa’s suggestion, however spitefully made, and do something to achieve her own ends.

  What else could she do? Return to New York after only days in England, and those days confined to a house? An extremely large house, but still, only a house. She had not traveled the Atlantic, a truly spectacular experience during which she had not experienced the slightest discomfort, to see a house. She was going to make something of this trip, something memorable, and then she would return home like the good daughter she had always been and would continue to be. Once she was back in New York. What happened in England, once her brothers were gone, would serve as her adventure.

  She was determined to enjoy every moment of it. The only obstacle left to her was to begin it somehow. Jane had no idea what it would be, but she was certain that Louisa had something slightly malicious in mind and Jane intended to face it squarely, coming out of it the clear victor.

  She did hope Louisa was around to see it.

  “What are you smiling about?” Joel asked.

  She turned her head slightly to look at him. “It’s a wedding. I’m happy.”

  “That’s not your happy look,” Joel said. “That’s your planning something disastrous look.”

  “Disastrous by whose definition?” Jane rejoined, grinning.

  “Father’s,” Jed said, looking down at her with stern fondness from his extreme height.

  Jane was not a small woman, but her brothers were both so tall and so firmly built that they were quite able to intimidate nearly anyone with the smallest effort. But Jane was not nearly anyone; she was more than accustomed to dealing with her slightly overbearing brothers.

  “Father is not here,” Jane said. “I am. I shall smile in whatever fashion suits me as often as I wish to.”

  “But not at whomever you wish to,” Jed said, giving a look bled of some of its fondness and reinforced with stern disapproval.

  As she had been seeing such looks from him for the past ten years, since Jed had turned fifteen and become suddenly and so seriously aware that he had a sister whom some man might find appealing, she found she could ignore him nearly effortlessly.

  “And whomever should I wish to smile at here, Jed?”

  she said softly, casting her gaze about the room. “They’re all British, aren’t they? Whatever could an Englishman do that should cause me to smile?”

  “I’m not going to answer that,” Jed said.

  “I’m just glad that you’re going home on the first tide,”

  Joel said on the heels of Jed’s comment.

  “And I’m glad that I won’t have much longer to try to manage the both of you at once. You’ve such skill at forcing me into a foul temper. I shouldn’t like my English cousins to see me as anything less than remarkable in every way.”

  “As most of our English cousins are freshly married, I can’t believe that they’ll think of you much at all, Jane,”

  Jed said.

  “Then I’m safe from scrutiny, which is such a relief.

  Now I may behave in whatever manner I please,” Jane said with a completely wicked grin.

  Jed scowled at her. She was quite immune to his scowls; he ought to know that by now.

  “Never that, Jane,” Joel said, “and never here.”

  “Do not think that I would ever do anything to cause Aunt Molly any dismay,” Jane said. “I wo
uldn’t think of it, as you should well realize.”

  “Because you care so deeply for Molly?” Joel asked.

  “Because I don’t dare provoke Mother, and you know she would hear every word of whatever romp I might find myself in.”

  “You are not going to find yourself in anything resembling a romp,” Jed said, looking quite alarmed.

  “But of course not, Jed, haven’t I just explained that?

  No, I shall put on my best behavior and no one shall find any need to tell Mother anything at all about anything. As to that, I can’t think what you’re both so bothered about.

  I shall be back on a ship to New York practically before the sun has set tonight. Not at all what I was expecting of this trip, but what choice do I have?”

  “None,” Jed said, though he was looking at her skeptically.

  Yes, well, she might have played her hand a bit too boldly. She was not at all known for such quick and easy acquiescence. Still, she had to quell her brothers’ anxiety about her if she had any hope at all of trouncing Louisa and her inane challenge. Inane it certainly was, but she was going to win it all the same.

  Joel was opening his mouth to say something dire, she was entirely certain, when Penelope, Iveston’s bride, was before them, a spectacular-looking woman at her side. Jane was almost certain she knew who the woman was; she had a very particular air about her, a nearly shimmering veil of allure resting easily upon her beauty. Jed and Joel reacted as men always did when faced with a beautiful woman, which is to say, they stood straighter, smiled brighter, and forgot everything they had been about to say or do.

  It was most convenient.

  “And may I present Sophia, Lady—” Penelope was saying before Jed jumped in and cut her off, in exactly the manner a man used when he was faced with a beautiful and available woman, which is to say, with far more direct-ness and urgency than was called for.

  “Lady Dalby,” Jed said, nearly jumping out of his shoes.

  “Sophia. It is good to see you again.”

  An understatement, if ever there was one.